Standard and BRC-20 do not store standard BTC transactions: Glassnode

Plaintiffs are wrong to say that the scripts – specifically BRC-20 tokens – are a denial of service attack on regular Bitcoin (BTC) transfers, an on-chain analysis suggests.

According to lead Glassnode analyst James Cheek, the majority of Bitcoin's blockchain space today still consists of formal, remittance transactions – “any remaining space around remittances has been filled.”

Comparing Ranks: NFTs VS BRC-20

According to Glassnode's figures, cryptography accounts for roughly 50/50 of total Bitcoin transactions with cash transfers.

However, the first is generally more effective than the second in the block position. Using less than 10% of the block data size, scripts generate 20% to 40% of the network's total payload.

“We're adding more value, and more fees, and more information to people on the same block,” Cheek wrote in a post to X on Wednesday. “Scribbles are good for Bitcoin, they pay miners while making space usage more efficient.”

The reality contradicts Bitcoiners' initial understanding of Ordinals as protocol weights and image-based NFTs to be written into the blockchain.

While this was primarily true earlier this year, the advent of the BRC-20 token standard has led to a “second wave” of smaller, text-based articles. These small but highly frequent transactions have vastly expanded the Bitcoin UTXO pool, populated the community, and consistently raised transaction fees.

In September, a Glassnode report highlighted the distribution of a BRC-20 token called SATS, whose months-long extraction process resulted in a 45.5% increase in 21 million Bitcoin UTXO. Earlier this week, Binance announced that it will begin listing trading pairs for SATS.

Ordinary opponents

The same report described the inscriptions as “fillers” for the blocks, such as soft newspaper wrappers, which were packed alongside the more valuable contents of the shipping crates. They buy any cheaply available blockspace with a small active block, and themselves are displaced by “more urgent cash transfers”.

“Your opposition is only ideological,” Cech told mainstream critics. Fortunately, Bitcoin has consensus rules that are objective and do not respond to our emotions or personal values.

Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashiere has repeatedly labeled regular transactions that exploit a flaw in Bitcoin's code as “spam.”

His startup, Bitcoin mining pool OCEAN, has chosen to filter transcripts from transactions it processes to “contribute to blocks full of real transactions.”